Óscar Alonso Molina:

 

BEINGS AND BELONGINGS THAT LAUGH

 Susanne S. D. Themlitz or the poetics of intermediary states

 

(...) Tell Me Who I Am (or I´ll Devour You). That’s how I see it: The entire work of Susanne s. d. Themlitz could be understood as an ironic journey in which culture dissolves into nature, where each detail of the civilised human universe glimpses its future as dystopia, propitiating reverie, the recreation of other possible worlds… Incidentally, once again, this is actually the melancholic terrain of modern aesthetics: Where the artist sees himself as a geographer, focusing on the map like a maker to take measurements of it, by means of these rules, which according to Aristotle, are intrinsically art.

Thus “tell me who I am” would be the ultimate question that pulses through the work of this Portuguese-German artist, considered as one of the benchmarks among those of her generation in European visual arts, and whose response thus affects a broad community of currently shared aesthetic interest. “Tell me who I am or I’ll devour you,” even as Oedipus had to listen to the Sphinx… But faced with the dissolution of the most solemn cultural models propitiated by Themlitz, we never witness a regressive or nostalgic movement towards other pre-Edenic forms in which the “natural state” would still not allow the complexities and anomalies associated with civilisation and development; neither does it shelter us by means of any kind of evasive process under the kingdoms of pure fantasy or any other type of escapism from our uncomfortable reality that art attempts to sublimate, avoid and ignore. Thus, there is no belief in paradise lost, as there is no fleeing towards the phantasmagoria or the new age substitutes and the contemporary pseudo religious imaginaries. Themlitz’ journey towards this so particular allegorical space might appear somewhat uncomfortable to you, as it involves all rebirth and distortion, but I assure you, (...)

 

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